About the Website

General usage

Hopefully everything is self evident. One less noticeable feature is that
some information is available in alternative forms, as follows:

A calendar symbol (Ical)
near a title or an item means that the information is available as an
ical feed, which can be used by
calendar applications (e.g., Google calendars). For example, each seminar
has such a calendar.

A feed symbol (Atom)
similarly provides the information as an
atom feed, usable by news
readers, such as Feedly.

A printer icon (Pdf)
provides a pdf version. This is created from a LaTeX version, which is
available as well, on the corresponding html page.

API: Essentially every page is available for machine consumption in both
json and xml formats. This is useful for interaction with other pages,
and for shell scripts. For example, I have the following shell function to
find someone’s contact details:

Editing content

A central principle for the website is to make it easy for any member of the
department to modify any content related to them, so that updates are quick
and accurate. To achieve this, one should first Login, using
the department username and password.

Once this is done, certain parts will slightly alter their appearance, to
show that they are modifiable. For example, the member’s name in the
appropriate table (e.g., on the Regular Faculty
page, if the user belongs there) will have an edit button by it, which
looks like this: Edit. Clicking it will bring up an html form where various details (e.g.,
research interests) can be modified.

Additionally, some items will appear with a dashed underline, which means they can be
edited directly, without a form. Examples of these include the office and
phone numbers that appear in the table.

On some pages, there will also be buttons for entering new items, and some
items may appear with a recycling bin (Delete).
Following are the main details that
can be modified.

Personal details. These include contact details, research interests,
students/postdocs/supervisors, etc.

Events. Click the New Event button at the bottom of the Events to add a new event (e.g., a conference).

Courses. If you are teaching an advanced course, an entry for it should
be created on the Courses page for that term.
See Courses below for details.

Seminars. If you wish to run a seminar, you may create one on the
Seminars page. You may then edit its
details, add meetings, etc. See Seminars below for details.

The Visitors’ Wiki. This is not really an
integral part of the department website, but is a useful resource for
visitors.

What elements of the site can be modified by a particular person depends on
that person’s roles in the department. If permissions seem wrong, please wwwmath_AT_math_DOT_bgu_DOT_ac_DOT_il.

Courses

There are two notions of a course: a “generic” course, which essentially
corresponds to an entry in the course catalogue (“Shnaton”), and a regular
course, which is an instance of a generic course that is actually being
taught by a particular person on a particular term.

The latter kind should normally be created by the person teaching the course.
The easiest way to do this is by finding a similar course in a previous term,
and clicking the copy icon next to it. The copy icon looks like this: Duplicate. This will create a new
course form, with default values taken from the previously taught course.
Another method is visit the
generic courses page, and click new
on the relevant generic course. This will use the defaults of the generic
course. It is also possible to start from scratch by clicking new course on
the Courses page.

The edit page for a course features an update button attached to its
generic course, which can be used to fill the blank entries from the
corresponding entries in generic course. This will also fetch information
from the course catalogue, if available. Likewise, the generic course has an
update button, which fills the blank fields with entries from the course
catalogue.

Seminars

To start a new seminar, use the New Seminar button on the bottom of the
Seminars page. This will open a page to fill
in the details. By default, the creator will be the only admin for the
seminar, i.e., the only one allowed to add meetings. However, every admin can
make additional users admins.

Note: If the seminar name exists only in one language, it will always be
displayed in that language, and will not be translated.

The page for each seminar contains the list of talks. If the user is an admin
for this seminar, there will be a New Meeting button at the bottom to
schedule meetings. As usual, each meeting can be modified by clicking the
edit icon by its title.

Please note that seminars should be re-created each term. As with courses,
the easiest way to do this is to find the seminar in a previous term, and
click the duplicate button Duplicate.

An efficient way to run the mailing list for the seminar is via the mailing
list server. If the seminar has a mailing list on this
server, and the name of the list is detailed in the seminar parameters, there
will be a link to the page, and the address will be advertised in the pdf
announcements. The seminar admins will have a button on the meeting’s page that allows them to (edit and) send an announcement to the mailing list.

Text formatting

Most of the text boxes that appear when editing components allow basic
formatting, using a variant of
markdown. In a nutshell, this
allows constructs such as **bold** for bold, *italic* for italic,
`code` for code, etc. In addition, it is possible to typeset basic
math using standard LaTeX notation, delimited, as usual, by dollar signs.
Please note that general latex is not supported, only math. Also, please
avoid using html markup, since most of the markup needs also to be translated
to LaTeX.